Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Partial and fully voiced acted Stretch Goals pls!

Hi,

So the big turn offs for me on divinity original sin was the lack of romance options, early random companion dialogue choices but above all of them was no voice acting on the game.

It's a shame since both divinity II and Dragon Commander had top notch voice acting.
Also having 800.000 words and not voice acting is not taking the quality of writing to it's fullest potential.

I know voice acting can be very expensive but could we have voice acting stretch goals with different scopes like:

- Main story line
- Secondary Quests
- Companion dialogue
- fully voiced game

Please consider this rpg fully voice was what made Bioware.

Regards D:OS Dragon backer,
Deathmachinept

D:OS 2 will have much more text than D:OS. Until the scope of how many origin stories, etc, are being added is known, it will be difficult to determine how much voice acting will be feasible.

Based on the development of D:OS and experience with voice acting in Dragon Commander and Divinity II, I'm pretty sure they can make a safe and average guess with a margin.

So they should have a value of how much it costs per thousand voice acted words or so.

But if they don't know (think about the stretch goals) how big the game will actually be, they can't be sure yet.

Aside from cost there are far more factors *against* voice acting, such as having to lock content at some point to have a clear copy to the actors, and then not being able to change it anymore.

Heck, the EE would have been hell if the whole game was voiceacted since all the added stuff, changed stuff would have required a full re-voicing, and if the actors weren't available they need to re-voice *everything* for that character. Compare them with just adding more branches now.

Also Larian was basically adding and writing to the game till release with D:OS. Due to the lock that I mentioned before Larian wouldn't be able to do that this time around, if they went with full voice-acting.

More negative sides of full VO is that mods will stick out even more since they will need to do equal voiced characters or stick out as a sore thumb. And getting VO for a mod is NOT easy, take my word on that (and if you won't just google 'my' mod "M4-78EP").

Also funny you mention BioWare since I'm pretty sure it hugely bit them in the back with The Old Republic (100+ million dollar budget IIRC, and that was even with a lot of alien VO surplacing human VO).

So in conclusion I can only say "no, no, no, no"
Just compare the amount of text in, say, Pillars of Eternity (not full VO, even if they voiced too much *everyone agrees!!!*) to a BioWarian game. That's like comparing the Lord of the Rings trilogy with a 150 page teenage romp. And then claiming it 'improved'...

Enhanced Edition IS fully voiced acted, mind you.

Yeah, I meant if it was fully voice-acted from the start. Then they would have to reget *all* of them for the re-write and update, or totally replace a performance.
Not to mention the amount of actually paid voiced dialogue getting lost.

It's stuff like that that sometimes makes expansions of fully VO very incoherent feeling. Like the SW:TOR I mentioned before adding a new race and still everyone in the original game acting like you're human for example cause they couldn't update it due to VO (With the most hilarious one's seriously asking what race X is when it's your own), then suddenly after 90% of the game they spontaniously discover you're not a human.

In an AngryJoe Preview at 15:53

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63-ws3_jhx0

Swen, is not sure as there will be millions of words due to more origins to be added. Though the words that pop out above the NPC's will defiantly be voiced (Swen said on that video) but I am guessing they really need allot more funds for full voice acting and the game is not finished meaning dialogue needs to be changed or have not been added where voice acting will be the last on their mind.

You are confusing SWTOR with KOTOR... the 1st is over 200mil.. the other most likely under 15Mil.

Not sure how Larian makes their voice acting but on other companies devs make contracts with actors for X years.. and make it that they are open for future dubs.. You see this in Mass Effect, they released DLC after the game and all the actors voiced recorded.

In every dev cycle content has to be locked at one point you can't write more quests because it will take more artists or you have to stop programming features to build quests and polish the game around it. There are multiple stages and content is locked for various dev groups while making a game. Further more writing and voice acting is usually linked and both are improved by working together.

You make little to no sense.. it's just another layer on the development, the hassle is more financial that a burden to development process.

Not sure if you know about the development of a game but voice acting is the last thing to be done and implemented..

KOTOR is "Knights of the old Republic" a very successful 2003 RPG that won many best game and best rpg of the year.
It was what catapult bioware with that came mass effect series and the "Old Republic" a MMORPG based on the KOTOR franchise.

Some people including myself when SWTOR was still on closed beta did warn that making a fully voiced MMO with that many branches and specific content would increase significantly it's costs and the logistics of mainting.. that's the reason why you see the later SWTOR content being less player specific and less personal.

Anyways what you are saying doesn't make much sense.. voice acting is just expensive.

If you know me, you know I'd probably be the last person on earth confusing KOTOR and SW:TOR. But yeah, it was 200 million, not 100. Also noticed how with the dialogue wheel each BW game gets less and less choice-rich, gets less and less dialogue?
As for AAA+ games, 15million sounds pretty low actually. So under I would venture definitely not.

VO for ME and stuff is pretty much done in batches. They aren't shipping out VO actors for every single DLC. They do one recording for all content now and in the future and that's it. As said, content lock. It would definitely be bad business practice to actually order them per DLC as you state in above post.

True, content locks have to be done at some point (feature complete, alpha, well you know the works). But as we saw with D:OS they could infact write all the way to release date. They threw out a quest on the beta, we found it jarring? Sometime missing? They can just rewrite it a bit, add stuff, maybe take away. As far as locking content goes, text is really one of the, if not the, latest. Simply because it's the easiest to do (anyone can just open text and write something), sure, for it to be good you probably need a skillset, but having the option is there, once it needs to be voiced, that's gone. There's been so many mods I couldn't make due to 'no VO'... so many people complained about VO quality (can't really do anything about that as a free crew), things I want to change but simply can't due to the VO restrictions set upon. While I can update to my leisure for any unvoiced characters or instances. Seriously, getting a VO actor to do some more lines shouldn't be such a "thank god" moment as it turns out to be... but sadly, that's just the fact of it.

Also I don't quite see the artist/quest example, it would sooner be programmer/writer/quest designer than that. Also the difference with VO is that the programmer can still actually do add/remove/alter a function if the need arises at any point. With voiced VO, at some point you're just "stuck" with it. Usually the level design artists move on first

No, really, I can guarantee you the hardlock VO can put on you can be worse than any engine-related limitations that someone's banging there head on.


Funny... where does that put lipsync?

Also just putting down work, do VO, then rest would generally be the worst possible thing to do. Aside from not functioning lipsync it appears your game is just RIDDLED with bugs, a lot related to the VO implementation. If only QA would also still work after VO. And programmers. And... and...

Also your cutscenes... well, let's not begin on how bad they would be if you just based made them without VO and then add it in later, magically hoping the flow is exactly what you imagined.

Yes, the voice acting is the last one to implant when the script of the game is in finalizing as it has been done before with Divinity: Original Sin (I think it took them 6 months when the game was still in development but the script of the game were finished). Remember that was only for the script above NPC's and player heads, though in the Enhanced Edition it's fully voiced.


I think we do not need to go much in detail as it's pretty much Swen said that there will be "voiced" but the speech above the characters head, and still unsure about full voice acting yet. I am also sure it's the most popular topic to discuss as these type of games does have allot of dialogue and most people sometimes want to chill and not strain their eyes too much on the screen :P

Lipsync? have you played Divinity Original Sin? there is no lip sync why are you bring this up? Have you ever played KOTOR cuz the lipsync is not that great or very accurate.

I brought Bioware because of Kotor a single player RPG game comparable to Divinity Original Sin budget wise.. you brought a 200mil SWTOR EA/BIOWARE game MMORPG not comparable to D:OS.

KOTOR was not a AAA game, lucasarts has never funded insanely expensive games, 2001 budgets did not reach 100mil values, plus KOTOR uses an inhouse engine the successor of that of Neverwinters, you also see they reuse assets, had very limited animations, high poly models were not very high poly, not very high res textures, invisible walls, limited drawing distances and also limited voice actors some did multiple voices plus the alien dialogue you mention.

Voiced acted games make RPG more immersive and tires you less[PERIOD]

I seem to recall that lipsync is mostly (if not entirely) done automatically anyway: not necessarily on-the-fly, but I don't think it requires any dedicated animation. I'm not speaking from first-hand experience, however, since my attempts at modding have never included getting hold of someone who can do decent voice-acting (and there's no way I'm doing it myself!)

"development of a game"
You didn't specifically specify D:OS. I was more thinking general computer development. But hey, sure to tie up those unspecified specifics if you're proven wrong, eh?

Re-read my post... you say "Full VO got them so great", then I said it bit them in the back in TOR. As of yet, you have not provided any evidence, nor even tried to prove that I am wrong at this point.

In other news...

KOTOR?
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-sith-lords-restored-content-mod-tslrcm/downloads/tslrcm-183
Nope
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-sith-lords-restored-content-mod-tslrcm/downloads/m4-78ep-patched
Never
http://deadlystream.com/forum/index...amp;sid=be7ab07c4f3d5677035e98c06c6297b9
Ever
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-31-fear-is-the-path-to-the-dark-side
Heard
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/..._modders_restored_Star_Wars_KOTOR_II.php
Of
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=485537937
It
http://blog.gameagent.com/faqs-star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic-ii-the-sith-lords-mac-linux/

I'm in D:OS II forum asking for multi stage stretch goals for voice acting on Kickstarter for D:OS II.
"I said VO was a big part of it's appeal" and it's a key factor of what make them different from the competition, for me Bioware is most known from their singleplayer games, SWTOR is their first MMO and had a lot of funding from EA it wouldn't make sense that I wouldn't be talking or reducing them to this 1 game of yours that didn't make what they are.

I'm not going to present evidence when I see you were not even interested in knowing what you are saying or put two and two to see I was referring to bioware single player games or bringing examples that are not comparable just for the sake of argument but I leave you with this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

Check the budget of games and the year they were release in 2000 lot of companies got burn for over budgeting their games like Shenmue, Nomad soul, IG 2, Ultima IX, Freelancer... So the industry was must more careful at that stage. The over 50mil budgets are rare and most from modern games, KOTOR didn't have innovative technologies or first time features like FFVII, Shenmue,Halo, L.A Noir, Tomb Raider, Swtor...

So +/-15mil for 2001 game was decent budget.

D:OS is not a void, it makes sense to view it in line with other videogames, since heck, it's a videogame. And unlike AAA+ BioWare games, it wont have a AAA+ budget. As such, decisions need to be made. What's more cost/benefit efficient for example.
You know, learn from mistakes/history lest you repeat them and all.

Obviously Larian did take lessons from their previous experience as can easily be seen by the differences between the 2 Kickstarters.

Yes, you are here asking that for this game. So we're looking at other games, past experience, costs etc. to see if it's "worth it" or a good idea. I can also go here and suggest that the Kickstarter $1000 backers should get a Ferrari. Big chance some cost/benefit ratio says "screw you"

We can just as easily talk about Mass Effect II or Dragon Age II or III or any of their other modern games who simply tell most RPG-fans (who backed D:OS II mind you) that there's no shred of BioWare left in BioWare and rather venture to Kickstarter for their RPG fill, since BioWare certainly doesn't give it.

For reference, here's a topic on the Obsidian forums about exactly the same thing, VO to a oldschool RPG. I can tell you most of the biggest RPG fans are not in your favour:
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75700-willing-to-pay-for-a-voice-pack-dlc

Freelancer was in development for 10 years. BioWare also made KOTOR1 in a 4-5 year timeframe (compare that to the 1 year Obsidian got for KOTOR2). Their own Neverwinter Nights also massively overscaled it's projected timetable. And as you probably wont recall their publisher Interplay got bankrupt even if games like Baldur's Gate II did well. Also I have to have a big laugh with Halo or Tomb Raider(!) being apparently big "first time feature" games. L.A. Noir? Aside from it's face caption technology it's got nothing either.